Introducing Stay Calm

Tonight's the debut performance of Stay Calm, the new band featuring Explode into Colors' Claudia Meza and Parenthetical Girls' Zac Pennington. They're performing as part of the Mike McGonigal-curated "Favorite Things" evening at Holocene, along with Pierced Arrows, Golden Retriever, and tons of other bands and artists. (McGonigal is the writer/publisher of Yeti magazine as well as the compiler of the tremendous Fire in My Bones gospel compilation on Tompkins Square; a second volume is in the works).

Check out Into the Woods' video of Stay Calm above. It's definitely in the same vein as Meza's Explode into Colors, and happily so—percussive heavy (that's 31knots' Joe Kelly on the drum kit), abstract, full of tightly wound energy, and extraordinarily danceable. This band is still quite new but I expect we'll be hearing more from them.